To improve Blackboard performance, minimize downtime during upgrades, and manage growing disk usage, the Faculty Senate's Computer Policy Committee (CPC) approved a DoIT proposal to delete all courses that are more than six years old at the end of each academic year. In addition, all empty, unavailable, auto-created course shells that have not been accessed by students or faculty will be deleted at the end of each semester.
The full policy approved by the CPC is as follows:
UMBC Blackboard Course Retention Policy
To improve Blackboard performance, minimize downtime during upgrades, and manage growing disk usage, DoIT will implement the following changes after the Summer 2009 semester:
1. All empty, unavailable course shells that have not been accessed by students or faculty will be deleted at the end of each semester.
2. Any course shells that are more than six (6) years old will be deleted at the end of the current academic year.
3. Instructors can archive any course at any time and keep a local copy for their own records, but only DoIT system administrators can “restore” an archived course to the UMBC Blackboard production server.
Note: Blackboard’s license with all clients stipulates that the company must only support “backward compatibility” of up to two (2) full versions from its current, generally available release. For example, Bb’s current release is version 9.0. UMBC is now operating under version 8.0 and upgraded to version 7.0 in January 2007.
4. Faculty are encouraged to “copy forward” the most current version of their courses, by copying into an empty course shell and then requesting to delete past versions of the course.
If they use the Blackboard grade book, faculty are also encouraged to download and keep a copy of it after each semester.
5. DoIT will broadly communicate this policy at the end of each spring semester, but only implement it at the end of the summer special session.